


the long way round

by empyrean



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-03
Updated: 2012-08-03
Packaged: 2017-11-11 07:41:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/476187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/empyrean/pseuds/empyrean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha walked out of a Soviet superspy organisation and into a team of superheroes. But there was a long inbetween. Or, How Natasha Became An Avenger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the long way round

**Author's Note:**

> A mash-up of Natasha's origin stories, official and retconned.

The Black Widow walks out from the steppe into the desert and finds nothing at all. She likes it that way.

Natasha Romanov isn’t her name, not the one she was given as an infant squalling in the arms of a mother that must have existed at some point. In the Red Rooms she was only ever her codename. She takes it when she leaves, not throwing down Black Widow in defiance (she’s too useful, been it too long, leaving the Widow behind would be like peeling off a layer of skin), simply getting herself another outfit to wear. Something she can make for herself.

At some point, it becomes easier than being the Widow (probably at the point Agent Romanov becomes Natasha becomes Nat).

But Nat comes later.

She’s been Natasha for a while now, flattening out her _a_ ’s in a way she never would back ~~home~~ (Russia. not home. Russia was never home, it is simply a place she once was). She files away her accent, adjusts, mimicks, files away any trace of where she had been. She wanders and leaves strips of herself behind.

*

She gets found eventually.

Cornered in some forgotten little village where cattle were included in the population count and the most interesting thing to happen was a fist fight between two drunks in somewhere around the turn of the millenium. She walks into the only bar and sees a man who does not belong here anymore than she does.

Some wonder why she joined SHIELD. Was she bribed, threatened, turned? Is there some ulterior motive (there isn’t, Natasha threw ulterior motives away first chance she got).

The only thing that happens in this:

She asks ‘What do you want?’, voice only shaking a little, because she’s tired now. Hoping absently that she will die, and it will be quick and he won’t offer her a prison, barless or not. Because all she has left is control over where she goes and she will never surrender that to anyone.

Fury shrugs, ‘What do _you_ want?’

And no one has ever asked her that.

*

She leaves Russia in the dust and tries to forget.

Then, decades after she left, a year or so after she joined SHIELD, they send the Winter Soldier after her.

They’ve tampered with his memories again – she tells herself this, as he puts a bullet in her shoulder and levels the gun at her face as she lies there bleeding, heaving for breath, wild-eyed with a panic she thought had been dredged out of her long ago. The man she had known might have killed her, but he would have been quick about it.

An agent she doesn’t even know has to save her, driving the Soldier off into the night, and all Natasha can do is lie there and try to breathe.

When she arrives back at headquarters, she ducks to avoid medical and Fury and Barton, patching herself up in her room as she used to when she was alone. She keeps her equilibrium until she is out of the shower and changing, still waters giving way in a flood of half-remembered terror.

She slides to the floor of the women’s locker room with her back to the bench, breathing deep and even. Her enhanced metabolism is making short work of her injuries, but the hole in her shoulder catching against her clothing both calms and disturbs her.

How long has it been since she needed to be rescued? Not in the living memory of most people in the building, she suspects.

The door opens, and she can’t even make herself look. But it’s fine. Clint sits on the bench, his leg against her arm (because Clint takes things like ‘women-only’ as a challenge). She presses her cheek into his knee and when his hand finds its way to her hair she lets it stay.

*

Later, much later, she will find a picture of the Winter Soldier as he was before in Captain America’s file and breathe a sigh at the name printed across the top. Something not even the Soldier knew.

I know you, she thinks. _I know you_.

*

Placements come and go, aliases, allies. Clint stays.

*

Every now and then she runs. Just because. She uses false names and fake papers and slips through countries with a glee she never used to allow herself. She says – to Fury, to Coulson – that she’s testing how good the SHIELD operatives are at tracking and reconnaissance. Clint laughs when he hears her excuse.

She runs because she can. And she always goes back for the same reason.

Sometimes they follow. It annoys her until it doesn’t, a game developing before any of them have realised what they’re doing. A hand-delivered letter from Fury. A re-booked dinner for two. Things that need to be investigated nearby, ‘just in case you’re interested’. Eventually they give up and just send Clint.

She skips to avoid him. He chases. She enjoys the pursuit, knowing that for once no one will have to die at the end of it. Once she introduces him as Mr. Eastwood to the hotel clerk and he laughs so hard she wonders if he’s going to be sick.

*

She runs until she’s reminded why she doesn’t have to anymore.

*

She does it sometimes to the Avengers, afterwards. They let her, never mind Jarvis could track her on every continent including Antarctica and if they suspected foul play for an instant they would (and could) punch everybody between them and her.

As it is, she runs and they leave the door open.

They understand. All of them. Her band of emotionally-stunted wonderboys.

*

Jane Foster is starry-eyed and kind and laughs when Natasha climbs out of her van’s back window to avoid Clint. Natasha would hire Darcy on the spot if she didn’t know that much like Stark, Jane needs someone to remind her to eat and sleep when her head is full of constellations.

Betty Ross is polite and friendly and unshakeable. Pepper remains, above all things, Pepper. Natasha sits in Stark’s office talking to her in the full knowledge that Tony would never notice she had ever been there. Tony’s plans litter the place but its Pepper’s writing on them.

Natasha moves through their lives with nary a ripple, entering through the doors they themselves opened.

*

Sometimes she can control it without leaving. Sparring with any of them, working with Pepper, missions with Clint, sitting on the roof and watching Steve draw. Updating Steve and Thor’s movie knowledge with a comprehensive list of the worst and best films available. Sitting cramped and comfortable, usually next to Thor – Natasha has known enough cold to last her a lifetime and he’s a walking furnace.  Tony’s living room is large but they always gravitate towards two couches in the middle. It should be uncomfortable. It almost is. None of them move.

They sit almost draped over each other, and when Pepper joins them she throws her feet into Stark’s lap and for the next few hours he massages them with an unthinking affection nobody else would have thought him capable of.

Smiling, Natasha lets her head loll against Thor’s shoulder and tunes out everything but the sound of the team.

*

She knows she’s been gone too long when they start to fret in the way only they know how.

She gets couriered notes and packages with New York or Malibu stamps. Sometimes they’re thoughtful, more often they’re obscene (Tony and Clint left together can produce terrible things and there’s only so much Pepper can do). Iron Man makes appearances in the area, thunderstorms bloom over her head, apologies in Bruce’s handwriting accompany some of the more inventive letters. Steve’s pictures always appear somewhere. New York captured by someone who loves it. Always an invitation.

 _Come home_.

*

After the battle, she and Clint had picked rubble out of each other’s hair.

‘You didn’t get what you wanted.’ She didn’t say ‘kill Loki’ because Thor was sitting next to them and even if he understands why they think it she can at least not voice it aloud. ‘Do you feel better?’

He rolled his shoulders (even though he hadn’t slept in as many days and his draw shoulder at least must have hurt - maybe _because_ they hurt, she’s never quite sure) and smiled. ‘Yeah, I think so. You?’

She had paused. She has red in her ledger and that will always be there (how could it not?) but she has to believe it won’t.

She just saved the world.

‘Yes.’

*

Eventually, she gets tired.

Eventually, Natasha Romanov packs her bags and starts to run home again.


End file.
